Fairly Good Luck with Diskinternal's File Recovery Software

Two months ago, while trying to install Linux OpenSuze 12.0 to replace a collapsed XP Pro operating system, I somehow lost the contents of my main C drive. I spent a long time looking for a solution on the Web and finally came across
Diskinternal's NTFS Recovery. Eventually the creators of the software furnished me with an activation key so I could give the product a full test run, and I've just finished, or at least finished the first successful step. The product can be a little tricky to use, but my tests show that it is certainly capable of recognizing and restoring files on a system with a trashed NTFS partition. I say tricky because I had to
try to restore the partition that was lost, and then CANCEL that action, before I could get the software to start recovering the files from the lost partition. I wasted more than a few minutes before I stumbled across this path to success, but other than that, the operation was quite straight-forward. One definite problem is memory. I only have 1 Gb of RAM on my Fujitsu tower, and after having cataloged around 3/4 of the 230 Gb of data on the drive, the software simply stopped running before I could save the identified files to another disk. I checked the System Manager and found that the software was using 475 Mb of memory (!!!). Either the software has a memory leak or rather poor memory management. (Probably it was designed before hard drives of 250 Gb were on the market.) I ran it again (two hours or so) and this time stopped it manually before it ran out of available RAM and hung the machine, and that way was able to recover about 75% of the files I lost on my drive. Increasing my machine's RAM to 2 Gb for around 30 euros would probably enable this software to recover most or all of the damaged partition on the drive. And, except for the slightly tricky entry logic mentioned above, the software is easy to use, intuitive, and most important, it delivers exactly what it promises.